Ten (mentionable) things to do with a corn cob

1. Soak it in the juice from a tin of tuna fish, hang it from the living room chandelier, then sit back and watch how many different ways your cat can come up with to get it.

2. Find an old Barbie doll, cut the legs off, strap them onto the bottom of the cob, then tell your family and friends that you have found a sure-fire way to reduce their cobbin' footprint.

3. Affix a set of four wheels to the cob and then place an ad in your neighborhood weekly that screams "Cob Drivers Needed!"

4. String 50 cobs together end-to-end, sneak into the city zoo and hang the natural-materials-only necklace around the lead elephant's neck. (Alas. You can be sure that it doesn't survive a curious trunk for long.)

5. Slice a bucketful of cobs into coin-shaped pieces, stamp the image of George Washington on one side and Abe Lincoln on the other, then sell them on e-bay to gullible amateur coin collectors for $10.00 each.

6. If you can't find any buyers for the "coins" described above, dip them in chocolate and sell them as 100%-organic chocolate wafers to vegetarians with an insatiable sweet tooth.

7. Slice 4 or 5 cobs into long, thin strips and make peach "cob"-bler for the church supper.

8. Grind a cob up into a very fine powder, fill a box of small vials with it, and show them off to your friends as "mummy dust" the next time you get back from Egypt. (Of course, you can also do this even if you have never actually been to Egypt. I'm not telling.)

9. Drive a thin, foot-long metal rod through a cob lengthwise, mount the rod in a secured fixture on the floor, and Presto! you've got a sinfully pleasurable rotating foot massager.

10. Scoop out four small recesses at 90 degrees apart around the bottom sides of a cob, glue a tiny glass eyeball into each one, place the cob into a quart-size sleazy-green beer mug along with a handful of strike keys from an old typewriter, and then vacuum seal all of them in a bucket-size time capsule which you then bury in a seldom-visited part of the city cemetery. Now just imagine how many centuries archaeologists and intellectuals 2000 years from now will spend debating the meaning of it all after the capsule is accidentally discovered during Big Dig 2. (Sort of reminds me of what the Ancient Egyptians did to us!)